Contents

How It Begins

The waka floats in the deep ocean, the sun motionless and searing in the clear sky. Māui, the trickster, casts his fishing line into the depths of the ocean, tied to his magic hook made from a human jawbone. Almost immediately the hook catches, and he pulls up an enormous fish that somehow becomes, as you watch, an entire continent. On that new continent magnificent dinosaurs -- taniwha -- prowl the dark forests. Volcanoes dim the sky with smoke and stain the air with the stench of sulfur, but the land is rich and fertile, and Māui's older brothers look on it with greed in their eyes. Māui watches them, deep in thought, with a faraway expression you can't read. Then he turns to look directly into your eyes, and says, "You know that some of my brothers cannot be trusted. You must keep them from carving up this great fish until I return from the gods with the proper karakia."

And suddenly he's gone, flying away into the sun in the form of a seabird, and you're left floating in the waka with Māui's brothers as they smile secret half-smiles to each other and reach for their knives, and you wonder what in the world Māui thinks that you, twelve-year-old Tim Cooper, can do to stop them before they carve up and defile...

XYZZY Awards 2010. Winner of 7 awards: Best Game, Best Setting, Best Puzzles, Best NPCs, Best Individual Puzzle (crossing the river), Best Implementation, and Best Use of Innovation. Finalist for Best Individual NPC (the monkey-thing).

Spoilers

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